I was fortunate to attend The Derby High School, Bury’s ARISS (Amateur Radio on the International Space Station) contact with ESA astronaut Tim Peake last week, representing the Radio Society of Great Britain’s Youth Committee.

Following the successful ten-minute contact, I said a few words about the hobby of amateur radio:

Install Raspbian on your Pi. In the setup process go to Advanced and enable SSH. Also, set it to boot to the command line rather than the desktop – you should be able to run this headless.

Do some basic maintenance

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sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo rpi-update

sudo reboot

Install Python

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sudo apt-get install python-configobj

Install dependencies:

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sudo apt-get install python-cheetah

sudo apt-get install python-imaging

sudo apt-get install python-usb

Now install WeeWX
Visit http://weewx.com/downloads to find the link to the latest .deb file. In this case it is weewx_3.3.1-1_all.deb.
Download it:

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wget http://weewx.com/downloads/weewx_3.3.1-1_all.deb

Install it:

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sudo dpkg-iweewx_3.3.1-1_all.deb

The installer will ask you for a location, lat/long (decimal degrees) of your location, altitude, station type and hardware model.
For the W8681 it is a “FineOffsetUSB” type, and the model # is “W-8681”

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sudo tail-f/var/log/syslog

will give you an idea of if it is working or not.
If dpkg complains of missing dependencies then simply perform sudo apt-get update followed by sudo apt-get -f install.

You might notice in the syslog that you get a USB error – this occurs if you have not yet plugged in the weather station receiver.

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sudo/etc/init.d/weewx stop

Plug in the receiver if you haven’t already.
Then, edit /etc/weewx/weewx.conf. I used nano. You will need to be root.
Adjust settings such as piping it to wunderground, or to aprs.fi/CWOP if you would like.
Save the file, and then start weewx again: